September 28, 2012

THE RESULTS ARE IN

One pesky thing about predicting the future is eventually the future arrives.

During the summer of 2007 we had an unusually warm Northern Hemisphere combined with winds that caused a "record" low level of Arctic sea ice. The alarmist seized on this and warned that soon the Arctic would be ice free. National Geographic News famously predicted that we could see an ice free Arctic by the end of the summer 2012. We had passed the "tipping point" and the "Arctic was screaming!".

Well guess what... its the end of the summer 2012 now! So lets see if there is any ice:

Looks like we just squeaked by with over 1.5 million square miles of ice!

Now, to be fair, we did have another "record" low ice coverage this year. We have had an unusually hot, dry summer. The following chart shows that last 12 years of ice coverage. You can see the previous low ice summer (2007) in black and this year in red. However, if you begin to look at the pattern, you see it is more random than linear. This is a common mistake people trying to predict the future make. The see a trend, and then assume it will continue linearly into the future. This almost never happens, especially with weather. It is like seeing that February was warmer than January and March warmer than February, so assuming the earth will continue to warm and by December we will all be dead.

What is really funny, is if you follow the red line back, we had a short "record" high ice coverage at the end of April of this year!

Also, which is usual for nature, far from being in some tipping point, nature is always in a combination of multiple cycles, one balancing out the other. So, while the Northern Hemisphere has seen warmer weather and less ice, the Southern Hemisphere has seen colder weather and more ice.
But you won't see that on the news!